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Newsweek
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
The Story of America's Declaration of Cultural Independence
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. America's declaration of political independence is a story Americans are familiar with. But few know the story of America's declaration of cultural independence, which took the form of a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Harvard College in 1837. By then, America's political institutions were taking shape, but a lingering question remained for Emerson: Could this new nation formed on the basis of government by the people create a culture and art that reflected our political ideals? In short, could America create our own Cervantes? Or our own Shakespeare? Or our own Michelangelo? The British cultural critic Sidney Smith had his doubts—as did most of the cultural elites of London, Paris and Vienna. "Who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue?" Smith opined. Smith had a point. The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. The grave of the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (right) in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Photo by Detroit Publishing Company/"There were a few American writers—James Fenimore Cooper and some early frontier writing, along with Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving. But America wasn't exactly a beacon of culture or literary talent," Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope Wildred M. McClay said to Our American Stories." The most impactful part of Emerson's speech came near the end. It was his call for America's separation from England's ruling elites—and Europe's, too—on the cultural front. "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," Emerson declared. And then came his challenge to American creatives that reverberated throughout the country. "We will walk on our own feet, we will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds," Emerson insisted. "A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believe himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." Emerson rightly saw the American revolution as a turning point in world history and had great admiration for the civilian army—filled with volunteer merchants, farmers and tradesmen—that fought and defeated the professional British Army. He longed for that same animating spirit in our cultural class: A bottom-up movement filled with creatives that represented our bottom-up governing ideal. Emerson's speech shook things up, with one small town outside Boston jump-starting America's cultural revolution: Concord. It played an outsized part in our military history and was about to become the center of America's literary and cultural universe, too. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne were all born in or close to Concord. All were buried there, too. What drew these writers together was a spiritual movement that placed the sanctity of nature—and the sense of the divine that nature inspires—at the center of the world: transcendentalism. "It was accompanied by a growing movement across the art world—The Romantic Movement—devoted to the sanctity of the individual," McClay noted. "In a nation whose organizing document began with the words 'We the People,' it made complete sense that the individual should be held in such high esteem by America's artists and writers. And the public, too." Transcendentalism also shared a common denominator with America's evangelical Christianity of the time. "Neither were interested in how things were done in the past: the established social elites of the day were the problem," McClay explained. "Transcendentalism was birthed alongside the rising strain of anti-authoritarianism in a new nation seeking to find its own way. Its own voice." From Emerson's speech would spring the work of Herman Melville, who was born in New York City but was profoundly influenced by what was happening in Concord. Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and Melville sent a copy to Emerson, who responded with a letter of his own. "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed," Emerson wrote back to Melville, who'd never attended college. Leaves of Grass was a big publishing sensation, and Whitman became the unofficial poet laureate of America's common man. "There was Whitman himself, in the iconic photo that graced the books cover, dressed in common worker's clothing," McClay explained. "Writing in open, free unrhymed verse, his writing reflected the city and country he loved. And its democratic ideals." No one better understood the significance of Whitman's work than British literary legend D.H. Lawrence—and the artistic talent about to be unleashed by this new Democracy. "Whitman's essential message was the Open Road," Lawrence wrote. "The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself. The true democracy where soul meets soul, in the open road." McClay concluded: "That's what Concorde produced: A body of American literature—and a soon to be developed body of American culture—that reflected the nation's values and virtues. Created by the people and for the people. America had found her muse. Had found her voice." What did Concord lead to? To distinctive American voices too many to name, like Mark Twain, Flannery O'Conner, Harper Lee, Earnest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson. Concord unleashed to the world America's musical contributions, which sprang from our universal appeal as a nation, and our multi-ethnic, multi-racial citizenry, and produced a mash-up of musical styles and influences that could only have been possible in America. From Tin Pan Alley to Broadway musicals, from American blues to country, bluegrass and our own unique varieties of Gospel, too, and our homegrown rock and roll, itself a mashup of America's many unique musical genres. And from Concord we produced our own classical music, too, best epitomized by George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Concord led to our own brand of movies, forged not by old American wealth but by entrepreneurial immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of them Jews escaping pogroms throughout that part of the world: Louis B. Meyer (MGM), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), The Warner Brothers and more. And directors (movies being a director's medium) who were themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants: Frank Capra, who came to America from Italy with his Catholic parents at the age of 6. Billy Wilder (German and Jewish), John Ford (first-generation Irish Catholic), George Cukor (Hungarian and not religious) and more. Concord led to our own brand of cartoons and animated content: EB White, Walt Disney, Dr. Suess, Mel Blanc and Pixar. And even our own brand of superheroes, which started with comic books that would become the biggest movie franchises in the world. Concord also led to the birth of America's own brand of sports. Baseball, which sprang from our rural roots, was our version of cricket. American football was our own more militaristic and exciting version of European football: soccer. Basketball was created from scratch a mere 60 miles from Concord as an evangelizing tool by a young Christian gym teacher named James Naismith. We even created our own brand of motorsport, which sprang from the American South's moonshining past: NASCAR. Would American art, culture and sport have come into its own without Emerson's speech? More than likely. But his Harvard speech kick-started a revolution in one small city, Concord, that helped launch a revolution in American culture. One that still reverberates today. If reread by artists and creatives across our nation, Emerson's Harvard speech might just kick-start another revolution today, and a new declaration of independence from the two cities—New York and Los Angeles—that have for far too long dominated the creation, curation and distribution of content in our vast nation. Those two cities—as big as they are—don't represent the breadth, depth and soul of America's people any more than the cities of London and Paris and Vienna did when Emerson wrote his clarion call to American creatives back in 1837. Or the aspirations and ideals of the people of our vast nation.
Newsweek
30-06-2025
- Business
- Newsweek
What the Industrial Revolution Can Teach Americans About the AI Revolution
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The speed of capital being deployed by the U.S. private sector on the artificial intelligence front is happening at a dizzying pace. Four U.S. companies—Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft—are investing $320 billion this year alone in AI technologies. If experts are correct, this revolution will transform work, and life, in America. And in highly unpredictable ways. There will be winners and losers in the workforce. And the nation that wins this race will be gunning for economic and military supremacy as well. To understand how America will make it through this transformational age, it's worth looking back at America's experience during an even bigger transformational period: the industrial revolution. That story begins as America had just slogged through the worst man-made disaster in our history: the Civil War. "The war's cost in every single aspect of American life is something we can hardly overestimate," said Bill McClay, a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of Land of Hope. "The costs were profound—in human and economic terms, marking the dividing line between early America and what might best be called modern America." Women factory workers in Pittsburgh in the 1900s. Women factory workers in Pittsburgh in the 1900s. Photo by Charles Phelps Cushing/ClassicStock/Getty Images Seismic economic and cultural changes were also underway. "What was once a sparsely settled, mostly agrarian nation was transforming into a bigger, more densely populated, more diverse and mightier industrial nation," McClay said. "These big changes in American life were exhilarating to some and frightening to others. But one thing was certain: industrialization was coming." There were many open-ended questions that troubled Americans? Was a way of life about to be supplanted? And was there anything anyone could do about it? There were big geopolitical fears, too. Would powerful cities like New York and Chicago overrun states without large industrial centers? Would this transformation disrupt the moral and civic foundations of the nation? The industrial age wasn't waiting for answers. "America's industrial output didn't rival a single European nation in 1865," McClay said. "By the end of the 19th century, America had leapfrogged them all." And the engine that drove America's economic growth was one that powered everything else: the railroad. "In 1865, America had 35,000 miles of railroad track. By 1900, that number had grown six-fold—to nearly 200,000 miles, more railroad than all of Europe," McClay said. America had the ideal conditions for this revolution. "We had great natural resources—coal, iron ore, copper, timber," McClay said. "And a rapidly growing population, filled with workers and consumers. And America possessed a culture of invention and innovation, too." The railroad propelled growth in other industries, most notably the steel industry. "In 1870, America produced 77,000 tons of steel. By 1900, that had skyrocketed to 11.4 million," McClay said. "Stronger than iron, steel became essential for rails, bridges, and skyscrapers—the foundations of industrial America." One man more than any other was responsible for the rise of the steel industry: A Scottish immigrant from Pennsylvania named Andrew Carnegie, whose wealth would rival any of the technology billionaires today. Like it or not, those businesses helped created more sophisticated markets, and at scale. "Businesses could move any good or product anywhere—and quickly," McClay said. "This increase in transportation speed and scale led to increased production for the expanding national market, creating what economists call a virtuous economic cycle." Examples abounded everywhere, including the rise of the mail-order business. The early adopter was Montgomery Ward, but Sears and Roebuck—the Amazon and Walmart of their day—would soon dominate the business. Its catalogue, the "Big Book," had massive reach, and at its peak, consisted of more than 1,000 pages with 100,000 items. Even houses were bought and sold there. "Customers could rifle through catalogs, order whatever they needed and have it shipped to their doors," McClay said. "And thanks to the railroad, it happened fast." This was transformative, especially for customers in rural America, who finally had access to goods previously available only to customers living near big cities. Railroads transformed rural America in other ways, too. "They helped settle the less-developed parts of the country, as settlers were lured to places where the tracks already were or were scheduled to be." There were other technological breakthroughs alongside the rise of the rails. "George Westinghouse's air brake was a game-changing innovation, allowing every car on a train to brake simultaneously. Before that, you could only stop the lead car," McClay said. "This invention meant trains could be longer, faster and safer." And then there was the development of the central nervous system of the railroad: the telegraph, without which railroads couldn't have functioned. "It was the railroad tracks that allowed the telegraph to happen, creating almost instant communication over vast distances," McClay said. The railroads even impacted time itself. "Time used to be a local thing, with every town setting its clock by the sun," McClay said. "So came the invention of standard time zones. Clocks across the nation were soon synchronized—and local time became a relic of America's past. Suddenly, you were on the clock—and so was the whole country." But the most overlooked aspect of the industrial revolution were innovations in business law and finance, because the railroad and steel industry required vast sums of capital to become viable businesses. "It cost $36,000 per mile to build a railroad at a time when the average annual salary was about $1,000," McClay said. The scale of this investment outgrew the family business model, which gave rise to a new financial and legal instrument to meet the challenge: the modern corporation. "Unlike traditional partnerships, corporations offered limited liability—protecting investors from being personally responsible for debts or lawsuits," McClay said. This protection induced investment at a scale needed to finance the industrial revolution. With the creation of modern corporations also came the rise of modern management systems to run these massive enterprises. And then there was the major innovation in finance. "Local banks didn't have the capital to fund the industrial age, and so rose the age of the investment bank, and no one symbolized it more than J.P. Morgan," McClay said. "He worked to consolidate industries and bring stability to the economy. And almost overnight, that word—consolidation—once seen as dangerous, became common practice." It didn't take long, thanks to Morgan's acumen, for U.S. Steel to become the world's first billion-dollar company. The rapid industrialization of America caused disruption and raised profound questions. "The way big business reorganized society around its own image, the loss of traditional rhythms of life, and the winners and losers created by rapid change were a few of the big questions raised by this rise of concentrated wealth and power," McClay said. The industrial revolution reshaped almost every aspect of local American life. "Where once time was measured by the seasons and the church bell, now it was dictated by the demands of a national economy," McClay said. "Whether people liked it or not, they were plugged in—part of a machine that had its own logic and momentum." The story of the industrial revolution is worth studying and examining as America hurtles forward in this AI and new technology revolution. The parallels are too similar to ignore.
